Analysis of lumpiness phenomenon in MRP

Occurrence of chaotic behaviors because of fluctuations creation and their intensified transfer along thechain is one of the main causes of inefficiency of Material Requirements Planning (MRP) based supply chains.One of the reasons of the inefficiency is the lumpiness phenomenon. Through this phenomenon, some partshave an irregular production schedule, with nothing produced in some periods and large batches released inother periods. In this paper it is tried via the mathematical models to analyze this phenomenon. Using the mathematicaldeduction it is shown that the inventory fluctuations in upper levels of Bill of Material (BOM) increation of lumpiness phenomenon are more effective than the inferior levels.